Holness warned to ease off unfair claims on political stage
Published:Tuesday | December 6, 2011 | 12:00 AM
by Daraine Luton, Senior Staff Reporter
HEAD OF the Hugh Lawson Shearer Trade Union Educational Institute, Danny Roberts, has urged Prime Minister Andrew Holness to be more candid in his use of statistics, especially as they relate to the economy.
Roberts, who left the People's National Party (PNP) and also parted ways with the party's affiliate National Workers' Union (NWU) last September, was responding to Holness' claims on the political platform during a mass meeting in Manchester Sunday night.
"He needs to be a little more careful and deliberate in both his use of statistics and his analysis. People see through it, and it is the old-style politics to make those kind of selective political points by looking only at one part of the equation," Roberts told The Gleaner yesterday.
In rhetorical questions aimed at the PNP while addressing the massive crowd of Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) supporters in Mandeville, Holness asked: "During this last recession, which is agreed to be the worst recession since the Great Depression, did any banks fail? Did we have to create any FINSAC? Did the public sector lose any jobs?"
He then answered his own questions: "We managed this economy during the worst economic period in the history of the modern world and we didn't lose any jobs, no banks failed."
However, in relation to the claim that no jobs were lost in the public sector, Vincent Morrison, president of the NWU, said Holness misrepresented the facts.
"It was not a fair comment at all. The prime minister does not really have his facts together. There are a number of entities in the public sector in which people have lost jobs," said Morrison, who will be running on the PNP ticket in South Central St Catherine in the December 29 general election.
The trade unionist also claimed that more than 20 workers from the projects department of the Urban Development Corporation lost their jobs.
Jobless sugar workers
Morrison also claimed that of the 7,000 sugar workers who lost their jobs when the Government divested its sugar assets, fewer than 3,000 of them are still employed.
"In fact, the vast majority of the workers at Air Jamaica lost their jobs; some of them are still unemployed," he said.
In the meantime, Kavan Gayle, president general of the JLP-affiliate Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU), said Holness was bang on with his pronouncement.
"In the public sector, any loss of jobs would have to be taken by way of redundancies, and such redundancies would have to come through restructuring," Gayle said.
"I can't recall any jobs being lost in the public sector per se. Where you would have had job losses would have been in the private sector," Gayle said.
In reference to the sugar and Air Jamaica jobs, Gayle said: "When you have job losses, they would have been characterised as companies having to make positions redundant because they can't afford ... . It's either that they are closing down, or they can't afford to operate those functions anymore."
He added: "These were by virtue of divestment. That is a different scenario and must be treated differently. The prime minister was truthful."
Meanwhile, Roberts said the Government has been able to achieve macroeconomic stability "but the statement is not complete".
He said: "We need to recognise that there have been massive layoffs and job losses in the private sector; there has been an increase in the number of persons who are now living below the poverty line; there has been a fall in real wages .... . The equation from a worker's standpoint can't be filled out unless those things translate into a sense of equity."
The Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) has said unemployment as at July 2010 stood at 118,200, an improvement over the 142,800 recorded in January of 2010. The STATIN figure also indicates that 91,100 Jamaicans were unemployed in October 2007, the month after the PNP left office.
The institute said it did not have statistics in relation to job losses in the private versus the public sector.